Post #2832577
2025-12-25 21:34 UTC
Replies (1)
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@siderea@universeodon.com 2025-12-25 22:37
@EricLawton@kolektiva.social @soph@grrl.me @hazelweakly@hachyderm.io @adub@kolektiva.social Of late, I have been thinking a lot about another angle of this problem: the activists within tech who *did* attend to what I have seen referred to as "the ninth layer of the OSI model" (see https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/nemeth-osi-9layer-tshirt.jpg ). Back in the 90s, so many prescient people in tech did yeoman's work consciousness raising in the profession and were completely, 100% correct. They said that business interests would try to Enclosure the Internet ("walled gardens"), and they were absolutely right. They said business interests would wreck the open Internet with info pollution (spam, e.g.), and they were right. They said encryption was all that stood between us and Big Brother, and they were right. Because of them, we have Net Neutrality, the open source movement, universal HTTPS, and so many resources we would be utterly screwed today without. But they also failed to understand and anticipate a whole bunch of things that come back to requirements discovery, which undermined their activism. We are watching the dynamic of which I am speaking play out in Fediverse vs Bluesky right now. The Fediverse had first-mover advantage over Bsky when Twitter was Xed out, but users abandoned the Fediverse in droves for a centralized corporate fascist hellsite that hated them. Because of things that the Fediverse could have done or done better than it did.